The National Locale Support (NLS) facility provides a means of adapting your program to the character code set for a particular country, without the need for your application to know what these are in advance. This facility is also useful in English-speaking countries for handling codepages, collating upper- and lower-case letters correctly, selecting the appropriate currency symbol and selecting alphabetic extenders (for the $, # and @ signs) for PL/I identifier names.
The NLS facility provides you with the means to use codepages appropriate for your country when using UPPERCASE, LOWERCASE, PLIASCII, and PLIEBCDIC built-ins.
NLS can also be used to create messages in your language if messages for your language are provided by the appropriate release of the product.